All Forum Posts by: Vijaianand Thirunageswaram

Brian, great read!! It covers almost every aspect about this great city...

Don, sometimes they do send letters late and they will give you more time to protest. It happened to me few times. Check the hcad site and find out whether it's updated and you will know.

Don, you can try multiple things. Goodwill sometimes will come and pick up but it depends. you can also try Restore from Habitant Humanity and finally you can try furniture bank who can pick up good furnitures as well. Also you can try local church stores as well.

As others have mentioned, Condos don't work unless you are getting for great deal. Monthly fees will eat up your cashflow and hard to finance smaller deals. Even HML lender think twice but they will charge hefty fees anyway which will again drain your savings. There are plenty of HML and Private lenders out there in Houston area. You just to find the right one works for you and don't take too much points for closing. We are not suppose to send referrals in the thread. You can certainly search the BP Houston forum and can find some or PM.

If its going to help you all out to prosper, here you go some contacts which I like to share.

Trisha from American Title - Trisha at americantitletx.com - She is good and can close all kinda of deals and has attorney as well who can work to get Subject To and other particular complicated ones.

As far lenders, they vary. When you mean Transactional lender, I assume you want HML who can help you to get through transactions. There are plenty in houston, small to big. Jet Lending, Zesus etc.,

Agreed. We had similar discussion in the general forum whether PM is really worth it. Many starting out investors has problem with it because they look at expense which is big on them. That's why I tell my clients who are just starting with one property to manage themselves. I even commented about it as well. That way you know what goes in property management. Then you slowly add properties, you bring in the manager to manage so you can concentrate on investing... 

Agree with you but if you put away 10% on $1200/month rent which would do $1200/year which you might not use for years to come. That's why I usually show my cashflow more by reducing the capex which is again your money. Both cashflow and capex is going to sit in your bank account doesn't matter how you want to tag it. It's all up to you to manage your funds right!! 

Now I see what mistake I made. 8.3% is already month percentage not yearly. That's my bad. Yes agreed but I wouldn't tag 8.3% percentage as PM fees. Vacancy rate should be able to cover it.  Anyway, I undertstand where you coming from as per fees bringing down cashflow. It's tough totally agree but you should need to make compromise on certain numbers and move on.. As they say, investors sometimes get stuck in analysis paralysis mode. 

As I said, ours is small mom and pop PM and we do have good client base who likes us and work with us for the low flat fee. I can send more info if you want, not in anyway here to hijack the post. 

If you have relationship with an agent, he should through out some recommendations too. There are few out their in the market who hands wholesale deals. 

@Nick S. I would like to share my 2 cents on this topic. Being a Investor, Realtor and PM, I get asked this question a lot from my investor clients. Your capEx depends on the condition of the property. It is subjective. If you are buying a property and making full rehab on the property, something to go wrong within a year is going to be 5% out of 100. So I wouldn't by default put 10% capEx on every property. That's my take on it. I do myself put 10% on my analysis sheet for most properties if I don't make the rehab on those properties.

Coming to PM cost, it depends, 10% is too high and there are many companies who do flat fees if you work with them and create relationship. We don't charge 10% as well, we charge flat fee very less compare to big fish out there. Anyway, taking that one month rent lease up fee, 8.3% is wrong way to do it. it's not going to be %18.3 every month. You gotta divide 8.3%/12 months, making it 0.07%, so your PM can be 10.7% per month. That would be better calculation than 18.3% every month. On the other hand, you don't know how long the tenant going to stay and may be 1-2 years or even less. It depends. so you cannot really fix the percentage. Being conservative is good but at same time shouldn't bogged with numbers and lose deals. 

Hope its clear as mud :-)

I am sure many of you investors have come across Hubzu online auction site. I deal with auction sites and Hubzu was one of them. They used to be Altisource now Hubzu. Cool name huh!!

Anyway, they have very good processing office all over to get this things moved faster on closing the deals if the property is good and clean. We closed few in the past but this time around we had issues and had to get around it. 

1. They had judgement pending in the property and never told us until 2 weeks before closing. After my investors spent time and money on appraisal and survey, we had to terminate and get out of the contract. It will be long wait before it's ready to close. Be careful to check it out before you start wasting your money. Title commitment didn't have anything on it. 

2. Another gotcha, all these auction sites charge the premium and other fees which are not part of the sale price at times. Your lender won't consider them sale price unless you request them and get approval from underwriter. It will be too late at that point because appraiser got request to appraise the property for purchase price which doesn't include those fees. It happened to us and he appraised exactly for that price and lender didn't want to approve to include those fees with the purchase price. 

3. Finally, auction sites you might find reasonable deal but gotta work with their pace otherwise you end up losing money. You need to send earnest money in 2 days after signing contract. Get all lender squared up to move quickly to the time line. Don't forget to have max credit approval days if going with financing. Cash deals, make sure to go through the title properly before closing and raise any objection needed. You cannot get out of the deal and you will lose your earnest money.

Again, I look for deals all over and auction sites are good source and works most times if all things are working along well for you. 

Hope this helps.